Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy

The special visual effects and camera tricks in this short comedy are easily among the best and most resourceful of its era. Both the variety and the quality are impressive, and most of them are also amusing to watch, in addition to their technical skill. There's no telling how much trouble they had to go to in order to make them look this good, but it was worth it.

The story is very slight, serving only to set up the camera tricks. It features a pipe smoker who comes face to face with a couple of high-spirited miniature female fairies and their antics. The tiny fairy characters are completely realistic, with the double exposures being done with care. There are also other special effects using stop-action and other such techniques.

It's very short, only a few minutes long, but none of it is wasted. It's funny, and it's quite a display of technical skill given the limited resources of its era.

If you are looking at the top special effects magician in early cinema, there was no one more brilliant than VItagraph Studio's J. Stuart Blackton. In August 1909, he released one of the most eye-boggling movies to ever come out up to that time, "The Princess Nicotine, or The Smoke Fairy." Photographed by cinematographer Tony Gaudio, who filmed several Bette Davis movies later on as well as "Little Caesar (1931) and "The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Blackton used mirrors to create a miniature fairy instead of a double exposure in front of a black background to astonish the frustrated smoker (Paul Panzer) in the movie. Also introduced in cinema were the giant props to make the fairies' smoking world look realistic as well as several stop motion sequences. So awed by the trick effects when the film was released, the magazine Scientific American devoted an entire article in detailing how each special effect was performed.

Also, one of the first product placements in movies was in "Princess Nicotine" by using the brand Sweet Corporal cigarettes and cigars.

One of the two fairies in her film debut was played by the future popular silent movie star Gladys Hulette, who played in several early talkie movies. Her career, however, flamed out later on, so much so that in 1948 she resorted to being a ticket seller at the Radio City Music Hall in NYC.

This is over a hundred years old. Its before folks had any idea of what film could really do. The imagine required is orders of magnitude what it would take today.

We loose sight, but nicotine was considered a hallucinogenic for creative science in the 16th century, something worth fighting and dying for. Some did in the quest, which transferred to Indian Thuja before it was all over.

This little film has a clueless man who discovers a small fairy in his tobacco. She's a vision and the source of a vision. She's impish and sexy. She's coy and controlling. She's small.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

A smoker falls asleep, and two mischievous fairies play with his pipe. He discovers this, and imprisons them in a cigar box. He removes a flower from the box, which contains a fairy smoking a cigarette.

Rating a film that is only five minutes long is a bit of a challenge. In this case, the title of the film is longer than the film itself. (Well, not literally.) But for 1909 it really deserves a lot of credit. The illusion of making people look small and interacting with full size people is easy today (2016), but for its time was probably not just a novelty but almost revolutionary. The Germans became the masters of trick cinema in the 1920s, but this clearly predates them...

I watched this short silent film online tonight and it was identified as a film by the genius French director Georges Méliès. However, when I looked on IMDb, it said it was by J. Stuart Blackton! Obviously SOMEONE is wrong! While watching it, I sure thought it was a Méliès film because it was so creative and the camera tricks were so masterfully done. If it IS a Méliès film, then it's pretty typical of the amazing stuff he did. If it is NOT, then obviously by 1909 other directors starting imitating his style and techniques. Regardless WHO is responsible, it is a cute and interesting little film well worth seeing--particularly by Cinephiles like myself.

If you want to see this movie yourself, you can see it online at http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=melies